Healthcare

I loved this picture that Medsphere sent me today. It shows the Medsphere "Catch the open source wave" van next to the Cerner semi truck at HIMSS 2009, a health care IT conference in Chicago.

Is this a sign of how much open source differs from proprietary software, or an indication of just how far we have to go before we can have "semis" of our own?

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One of President Obama's biggest presidential ambitions is to reform the U.S. health care system. With more than $2 trillion spent each year on health care costs, an estimated 25 to 30 percent of which is administrative waste, one of the best stimuli to the U.S. economy could be to fix our broken health care system.

It's unclear, however, whether the Obama administration plans to tackle one of the root causes of U.S. health care inefficiency: closed, siloed, and payer-centric data.

Talking with a neighbor the other day who specializes in health care IT, he … Read more

President Obama has made transparency a hallmark of his presidency, with open source an integral part of this pledge. Obama has also expressed a desire to overhaul the U.S. health care system.

This week those two goals came together this week in Connect, "a(n open-source) gateway between multiple federal organizations and the proposed national health information network," according to Modern Healthcare.

The goal is to reduce the cost and complexity of tying into the U.S. national health information network, with three of the largest federal health care provider organizations, Defense and Veterans Affairs departments, plus … Read more

Companies in the wireless industry hope they can jump on the stimulus spending gravy-train as hospitals and other medical facilities seek money from the government's economic stimulus package.

Wireless in the health care industry was a big highlight at last week's CTIA Wireless 2009 trade show in Las Vegas, where Dr. Eric Topol, chief academic officer of Scripps Health, gave a speech and demonstrated how wireless operations can benefit health care.

And this week, many wireless companies and several other big technology companies are gathering in Chicago at a health care technology trade show. Several companies such as … Read more

Dell joined a growing chorus of IT companies trying to grab a bigger slice of the market for digital health care records.

The computer maker announced a series of partnerships on Monday aimed at bolstering its health care chops. At the high-end, the company announced a strategic alliance with Perot Systems aimed at selling to hospitals, health systems, and physician practices. At the low-end, Dell said Sam's Club will start selling a system for doctors to manage their records electronically, combining Dell hardware and software from eClincalWorks.

The announcements come at the start of a healthcare technology trade show … Read more

In a win for Microsoft's health care business, NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital said it will use the software maker's technology as part of a push to make digital health records available to its patients.

The hospital system will start making health records available online, initially to cardiac and cardiothoracic patients. Customers can view their records online, opt to copy them into a personal health record and then, if they wish, share that record with other health care providers.

"These really are the patients' records," said Aurelia Boyer, a former practicing nurse, who now serves as NY Presbyterian's … Read more

About four weeks ago, I went for an annual physical and had standard blood work done. I was told to call back in a week, and of course I forgot. Today I had a message that said: "Hello, this is Dr. XX's office, please call us back at xxx-xxx-xxxx." That was it--the person didn't identify herself and also didn't say what the call was for. When I dialed the number, I was expecting to be told that I owed them money. But actually, the woman on the phone had no idea why she had called … Read more

Oracle on Monday announced plans to acquire Relsys, which develops drug safety and risk management applications.

The acquisition, which is expected to close by June, is designed to bolster Oracle's Health Sciences Global Business Unit, formed last summer. Health sciences is one of a number of industry sectors into which Oracle is delving via a buying spree.

Relsys develops applications designed to aid drug, biotech, and medical-device companies in streamlining their operations, adhering to regulatory compliance and improving the safety of their products.

With the acquisition, Oracle aims to provide its customers with the ability to identify safety risks … Read more

President Obama's stimulus package is putting aside roughly $21 billion for healthcare technology and the development of electronic health records (EHRs). At this point when we say "billion" or even "trillion" it doesn’t have much of an effect. So let’s try that again – Obama's stimulus package is putting aside $21,000,000,000 for healthcare technology. It is a ridiculous amount of money.But, where will it all go? Most of it is earmarked for the creation and utilization of electronic health records, which is essentially a digitized … Read more